21–30 of 78 posts
Getting free money with no strings attached makes you happy - who would’ve thunk…
Sales taxes ramp up the cost of living.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The tax code (at least in the US, YMMV in other countries) is already progressive. Making more will never have you taking home less. However, most welfare systems have hard cutoffs. If you get $500 in SNAP a month and make $500 a month, you have $1000 to last a month. And if the cutoff is $501, making that one extra dollar is going to cost you $499. What would be more difficult, also gameable, but better all around i…
> Making more will never have you taking home less. There are corner cases where making more can leave you with less outside of welfare. Tripping into the next IRMAA bucket is one simple to understand one.
Are there any actual cases of making more earned income via a regular job worse than taking that extra dollar of pay? I'm guessing a few very rare corner-cases exist, but I can't immediately think of any. I imagine they would be somewhere in the neighborhood of the EITC or AMT type things.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The tax code (at least in the US, YMMV in other countries) is already progressive. Making more will never have you taking home less. However, most welfare systems have hard cutoffs. If you get $500 in SNAP a month and make $500 a month, you have $1000 to last a month. And if the cutoff is $501, making that one extra dollar is going to cost you $499. What would be more difficult, also gameable, but better all around i…
> Making more will never have you taking home less. There are corner cases where making more can leave you with less outside of welfare. Tripping into the next IRMAA bucket is one simple to understand one.
And basically, as your income goes up, so does your Medicare premium.
I wonder what is the difference between the two groups as far as the rate of finding employment. Might be that the act of looking for a job is stressful. If the goal is to get people back to work, it might not make sense to optimize just for better mental health.
Here’s the study, I think https://www.demogr.mpg.de/papers/working/wp-2025-035.pdf It would be better if they made it mandatory for everyone to respond to follow-up surveys, as the response rate differed enough to be called out as a study limitation. One interesting thing to note is that the study didn’t find that basic income support increased the chances of becoming employed, or receiving basic income support reduc…
Well the article points out similar (and sometimes even stronger) effects on mental health for experiments in Malawi and Germany. So seems that it does extrapolate.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
And note that actually getting work removed the controlled money. That's quite a disincentive to actually finding work. Welfare systems very often end up being a trap because of this--people can't afford to succeed because they'll hit some tripwire that makes them worse off. I'd like to see welfare systems and tax codes modified with a rule that no situation can cause more than a 50% marginal "tax". (Which would mean…
The tax code (at least in the US, YMMV in other countries) is already progressive. Making more will never have you taking home less. However, most welfare systems have hard cutoffs. If you get $500 in SNAP a month and make $500 a month, you have $1000 to last a month. And if the cutoff is $501, making that one extra dollar is going to cost you $499. What would be more difficult, also gameable, but better all around i…
School lunch programs have two phases, free, and reduced. Medicaid varies a bit by state, but transitions to Obamacare subsidies. Hitting the cutoff for medicaid can really hurt, though, if your employer doesn't provide healthcare benefits.
Getting free money with no strings attached makes you happy - who would’ve thunk…
There are plenty of complaints on HN how increased buerocratic burdens/tasks, in particular when they seem pointless or unrelated, leads to low job satisfaction, burn out and mental health issues. But somehow when it comes to the unemployed the same thing does not apply?
I certainly can relate that the more tasks pile up the more stressed I become (and being unemployed certainly can feel stressful). Adding some pointless administrative tasks that don't help with my actual goals can often be enough to push me over the edge so I just want to quit.
> and satisfy bureaucrats That's an unnecessary quip as that's not the point of checks. It's not surprising that if unemployed people receive benefits with no strings attached their "mental health" is better since it removes pressure to find a job. > It was the unconditionality itself—the simple act of trusting people with resources, without surveillance or judgment, without hoops to jump through or forms to fill out…
If not, why not? Those checks are just there because you are expected to earn a profit for the company.
From what I understand, two groups of unemployed persons got €560/mo. One group was required to look for work while the other wasn't. And one group was required to report to unemployment offices, and "satisfy bureaucrats". The results were that the one with unconditional payments had "better mental health". Apparently they used a "validated five-item mental health screening instrument that identifies people at risk o…
Which I saw in my own family. My mother was never unemployed and never demanded anything from the state coffers, but she was afraid of the bureaucracy and the inscrutable power that it wielded over citizens' matters.
My former secretary is somewhat spooked by contact with the governmental structures as well.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>>since it removes pressure to find a job. NO, it does more than that. 1) It removes pressure to find a job on the schedule and expectations of the overseers . 2) It allows the recipient to start work even at a lower-level job without losing out. 3) It allows time for the recipient to find a job that actually suits them and their employer rather than taking the first thing that comes along out of desperation and pres…
Unemployment benefit is to help you while you are out of job _involuntarily_ and while you look for a job, not to subsidise your lifestyle or aspiration to find your dream job. It's not about "patriarchal bureaucracy", whatever that might mean. There is actually a moral aspect here. Morals in society is that you work to earn your own living and that you don't abuse kindness. > This is not testing "unemployment benefi…
A lot of people think that a supermarket with self-check out would probably be empty within the day, with people trucking off their goods in every which direction. Maybe in some places that's actually still how it works. This supposes that morality is mostly extrinsic (low trust society).
Throughout quite a bit of the West, Europe , Finland we're dealing with high trust societies these days. In these countries, all said and done self checkout is actually netto cheaper to run than manned checkout, and that includes shrinkage. (Above some point) every penny spent on checkout counter operators is wasted. So -at least in Finland-, morality is mostly intrinsic (high trust society).
If you tell this story to a person from a low trust society, they'll think you're pulling their leg. Every man, woman, and child to themselves, right?
Meanwhile, in high trust societies like Finland, it's just Tuesday: 'Bleep... bleep'.
Now when it comes to people with intrinsic morality: Making them go through extra procedures might actually slow them down; Hiring extra people to keep an eye on them can go negative yield.
There's more to be said on this, but the key intuition is that much of western thinking on morality is still calibrated on extrinsic morality, while many westerners are now actually being raised with intrinsic morality. It's a slow cultural change.
+ see also: Dan Pink: Drive. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc